Beyond a joke

Okay I take it back, it’s not funny, it’s disgusting. Read the interview – in Dartmouth Review, a notoriously right-wing paper, and by god she’s giving them ammunition.

Read her dropping names and explaining that students are not familiar with these earth-shaking names and so that’s why they get everything wrong and don’t understand how right she is.

it’s kind of interesting that when you are trained in graduate school, it’s sort of like, you know, you’re trained in this kind of—I don’t want to say it’s political—you must be aware that most college campuses are very liberal…and the training which you receive, it’s very much slanted toward a particular political point of view…In other words, talk about, you know, in French theory—we talk about Lacanian psychoanalysis. Lacan was a very radical psychoanalyst, but he’s considered almost like a god, Jean-François Lyotard… Bruno Latour—highly regarded in the field of science and technology studies. But these students aren’t aware of the framework in which I was training. They’re not; they’re just coming into college. So right there, there’s a discrepancy between what I know and how I was trained and their worldview.

In short, they haven’t been trained to worship her gods, so there’s a discrepancy. They haven’t joined the church of Lacan and Lyotard and Latour, so they don’t know what she knows, poor things.

They were concepts that were part of the field, and I was trying to bring it to the table. It offended their sensibilities, because the whole course of “Science, Technology, and Society” was about problematizing science and technology, and explaining the argument that science is not just a quest for truth, which is how we think about science normally, but being influenced by social and political values…This type of argumentation—the reason I did that in the context of expository writing, I thought “by reading arguments, they will learn how to form arguments, think better, and write better.” That was my goal, because when you think better, you write better.

True. So go back and learn to think better. Learn to think instead of dropping names. Then you’ll write better and also talk better. Right now you’re in a bad way.

My daughter did her first degree at Kings University College in Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada). They were deep into the pomo thing, and she learned to play the word game with the rest of them, very well. Then she tired of the game and decided to go on in philosophy at Dalhousie University. Knowing the framework in which she had been trained, she had to do a qualifying year first! Which she managed with flying colours. And now she is on to her PhD in Ontario. But she said at the time how easy it was to pick up the jargon, and as long as she said something that sounded deep, people thought she really understood. Amazing. It certainly would not teach the basics of clear thinking and writing!

I think the answer might be very simple, and the clue is in this paragraph:

“Sure, I am like, I really have a lot of work right now, I have two book manuscripts to work on, that doesn’t even include the manuscript about my life in higher education, I have two grants to work on, I have an article to work on, I have three articles to work on, I really have so much work to do and you would not even believe, I really have a lot of work to do. I am not the kind of person who wants to make a big fuss about petty or trivial things. So, I have a lot of things to do that I could be focusing my attention on in very productive ways.”

Work-related stress, perhaps?

Certainly the rest of the interview gives that impression, quite apart from her pomo leanings – well, when we’re completely over-loaded (or have taken on too much through nobody’s fault but our own), it can be hard to keep up the strict rationality.

“One of the things that she did, this is also really interesting, was that she would always ask me how to spell things. That was her thing. She would say how to do you spell this? How to you spell that? I mean—what am I supposed to do?—so I would tell her. One time Tom Cormen was sitting in the class, and she asked me, how many T’s are in Gattaca. This was the kind of question she was asking, “how many T’s are in Gattaca?,” and I was about to answer her and Tom Cormen pre-empted me, “two t’s.” I’ll leave you to interpret it.

TDR: No. No, I don’t understand that.

PV: I have to tell you: it means tenure track.

TDR: Oh, okay.

PV: Because I wasn’t tenured track.

TDR: Oh, okay, yes.

PV: They were trying to intimate that I wasn’t ready for tenure track.”

I just slogged through Venkatesan’s “Yin, meet yang” article. If this is a sample of what she was teaching, the students were being remarkably forbearing. Or perhaps, as an engineer turned scientist, I’m just too ignorant to understand.